Hybrid Cloud

Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management company, today announced its data protection solution for Pure Storage FlashBlade, along with new integration between Rubrik's Cloud Data Management Products and Pure Storage's FlashArray//M. With this new collaboration, customers can achieve simplicity, performance and integrated data management across hybrid cloud environments.

"We are pleased to lead the market with our data protection solution for FlashBlade. Finally, customers can achieve unparalleled simplicity, performance and scalability across their environment with Pure and Rubrik," said Bipul Sinha, founder and CEO of Rubrik. "Our integration truly ties together Pure's performance and manageability, to Rubrik's cloud native data fabric, making data more agile across hybrid cloud environments."

Faction, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted Faction a new US Patent #9,621,374, which extends the functionality of hybrid and multi-cloud to new protocols including Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). The new patent further reinforces Faction's place at the forefront of hybrid and multi-cloud solutions.

Faction's new patent allows customers to leverage two key innovations in the networking and cloud arenas: VXLAN and SDN. VXLAN technology is attractive to enterprises as it works to improve scalability challenges associated with large cloud deployments. SDN technology enables networks to add agility and flexibility, while allowing administrators to respond quickly through a centralized control location.

Microsoft announced the launch of new migration resources and tools to help customers who want to take the hybrid route for their cloud deployment. As more and more companies look at hybrid cloud as the path of least resistance to a cloud presence, Microsoft is slowly rolling out more services to address that growing need.

Microsoft now offers a free Cloud Migration Assessment, which provides Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) across cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments. According to Microsoft, the automated discovery tool will assess the client’s workload configuration and provide a detailed validation plan...

The past decade has brought much change to the IT infrastructure industry as enterprise IT companies scale up their data consumption to unprecedented levels. Today’s enterprise IT giants require far more speed, power and bandwidth to successfully run their businesses and this is only possible via enhancements to the underlying infrastructure.

Infrastructure develops so quickly that industry practices in 2020 will likely be unrecognisable from what they were 10 years ago. Infrastructure has become more powerful, faster and more secure - and we have still only just scratched the surface of what’s possible. This article will examine some of the current trends within the industry as it stands, as well a look at what the future holds for IaaS in 2017...

IBM and Red Hat, Inc. announced a strategic collaboration designed to help enterprises benefit from the OpenStack platform's speed and economics while more easily extending their existing Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads to the IBM Private Cloud.

As part of this new collaboration, IBM has become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, giving clients greater confidence that they can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud when the offering launches for general availability at the end of March 2017.

Additionally, as part of the agreement, Red Hat Cloud Access will be available for IBM Cloud by the end of Q2 2017, allowing Red Hat customers to move eligible, unused Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions from their data centre to a public, virtualized cloud environment in IBM Cloud Data Centres worldwide.

Imperva, Inc., committed to protecting business-critical data and applications in the cloud and on-premises, today announced Imperva FlexProtect to give customers access to both Imperva SecureSphere and Imperva Incapsula within a single subscription agreement. By providing the flexibility to deploy Imperva web application firewall (WAF) solutions based on need, the subscription helps organizations simplify the protection of enterprise applications as they migrate their portfolios from on-premises data centers to the cloud.

The cloud market will accelerate in 2017 as enterprises seek to gain efficiencies as they scale compute resources to better serve customers, noted a Forrester Research blog.* As companies migrate applications from on-premises to the cloud, application security itself must become hybrid to support the combination of both on-premises and cloud appliances along with cloud services. However, within the enterprise application portfolio, there is usually uncertainty surrounding which applications will move and when, how they will be rearchitectured, and what happens if an app needs to be migrated back on-premises or moved to a different cloud. By giving customers the flexibility to use Incapsula and SecureSphere, regardless of where an application is initially deployed or migrated, Imperva FlexProtect directly supports dynamic hybrid cloud deployments and provides needed investment protection to manage this transition.

CloudVelox, a pioneer in cloud automation and orchestration software, today announced new enterprise-grade automated cloud workload mobility and optimization capabilities with enhanced management and control features for its One Hybrid Cloud (OHC) software. Through automation, OHC accelerates workload mobility and optimization in the cloud by matching data center environments with optimal cloud services to deliver cost savings or improved application performance, without requiring specialized cloud skills. New features for cloud optimization include: application-centric instance tagging, placement groups, multiple security groups, Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. New features for managing workload mobility include comprehensive system reporting and alerts for the successful completion of workload migrations to the cloud. With the new powerful suite of OHC features, enterprises are able to accelerate time to value, are further equipped to meet regulatory and compliance requirements and reduce IT effort while enhancing system visibility, management and control.

According to an IDC study, nearly 68 percent of organizations are using some form of cloud to help drive business outcomes; however, only three percent have optimized cloud strategies in place today. Businesses are challenged by unexpected cloud costs, the complexity of mapping security and data policies from the data center to the cloud, a scarcity of skilled cloud engineers, and a lack of visibility into monitoring the status of mass workload migrations.

SwiftStack, a company that powers hybrid cloud storage for enterprises, today announced availability of its latest software release, SwiftStack 5, which will be demonstrated at the Google Cloud Next Conference 2017, March 8 through March 10 in San Francisco, at booth #A4. One notable enhancement to its Cloud Sync feature is the ability to replicate data bidirectionally between the four Google Cloud Storage offerings, as well as other cloud provider's solutions. Two-way synchronization of data stored between on-premises and the public cloud is managed as a policy controlled by IT, so data is automatically delivered to where it can best be computed on or utilized, within private data centers or in the public cloud.

"We believe that enterprises now and for the foreseeable future will live in a hybrid cloud world, where business value should determine where data lives, when it moves and how it behaves," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "IT creates and controls the policies for corporate data that places data on-premises and/or in the public cloud, based on the criteria that keeps their customers happy: cost, performance, security, access and availability." More about Duplessie's view on multi-cloud data management can be found in this short video:http://learn.swiftstack.com/2017-esg-multi-cloud-data-management.html.

Docker today announced Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), a new commercial platform for enterprise development and IT ops teams that build, run, and operate business-critical applications in production at scale across the software supply chain. Comprised of a container runtime, with integrated and multi-tenant orchestration, security and management in addition to an ecosystem of certified technologies, Docker EE gives enterprises an open container platform that ensures a simplified yet rich user experience. This new modular platform makes it easy to install, configure and upgrade Docker on certified infrastructure (operating systems and cloud providers). Docker EE is available in three tiers: Basic comes with the Docker platform, support and certification and Standard and Advanced tiers add advanced container management (Docker Datacenter) and Docker Security Scanning.

Docker is also launching its Docker Certification Program, a framework for partners to integrate and certify their technology to Docker EE and make their solutions available on Docker Store. The Docker Certification Program is designed for both technology partners and enterprise customers to recognize Containers and Plugins that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Docker Certification is aligned to the available Docker EE infrastructure, which provides enterprises with a trusted way to run more technology in containers with support from both Docker and the publisher. With certified containers and certified infrastructure, organizations now have the reassurance that the entire portable stack is supported and compatible with technologies from other ecosystem partners.